Writing goals and challenges

I just signed up for inkingitout, a writing community where you aim to write a certain number of words (75,000 or more) and then check in for how it's going, and stuff. The sign-ups are still open for another day, so I thought I'd do a little promo in the case anyone else is interested!

Challenge yourself to write 75000 words or more in 2018!

inkingitout inkingitout inkingitout

Sign ups now open!

I'm quite excited by this. Write Every Day (which has been hosted by esteliel this month and will be hosted by trobadora in January) has been so good for my writing, and it's been lovely to have a small community of writers to connect with, and I look forward to more of that sort of goodness. And I really want to get more written next year, and feel an extra challenge should help.

I surprised myself last night when I counted my words from the whole year and found out I'd written over 120.000 words this year. I had felt fairly unproductive most of the year, due to various health/energy/life issues, but that doesn't sound too bad. Of course, most of it went towards things that aren't finished, but it's all writing and I learn from it.

I decided to shoot for 150.000 in 2018. It's a little more than I did last year, but not too much of a challenge to cause an indecent amount of stress. One of the things I want to do in 2018 is finally write a full novel draft, not just start an awful lot of original projects and then abandon them and move to something else, which is what I did all of 2017. I usually write my original stuff in Finnish, which uses way fewer words per same amount of text than English does. (Various reasons for this: we don't have articles, we use a lot of suffixes instead of prepositions, and we use a lot of combined words, so expressions like "summer holidays" or "Queen Mother" or "a carton of milk" are just one word in Finnish. Also, our verbs do funny things, so where an English-speaker might say "I wonder if I should write," in Finnish the same phrase might be "kirjoittaisinkohan". I love my language.) So if I end up succeeding in my goal of writing more original fiction this year, I don't want to be discouraged because it makes the word count goal harder to reach.

In addition to the original fiction goal, I'm hoping to finish more fanfics this year; I've got an awful lot of unfinished ones lying around on my hard drive. It would also be nice to finish something that doesn't come with a deadline for a challenge/exchange/fest. I'd especially like to publish more femslash and other female-character-oriented fics the coming year. Also, I'd like to publish more Torchwood fic. Most of my Torchwood fic is Jack/Ianto, and while that's a common pairing, I feel there's still room for stories featuring my visions of the characters. In addition, I'd love to write Toshiko, and the world could use more of her. Torchwood is really so perfect for writing fic in: the canon offers so many tantalizing openings, but doesn't follow up on things enough, so you're just itching to write something to fill out the gaps and get things to make more sense.

So, anyway, that's enough on my writing goals and such for now. Yuletide reveals will come soon! And less than a week to write something for fandom_stocking, and I haven't even started! I've got plans, though.